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update··on There Is No Handbook for Being a Writer
> The article's also evidence of the temptation to write about yourself, as I suppose that's what you know best. I have seen a lot of successful authors who inject themselves into the narrative.

Great point.

Searching for sentences that include "I", "Me", etc. in your writing is an excellent exercise.

> And I suppose if you can write about outrageous things you do, it probably makes people all the more motivated to read you.

Personally, I think this is just human nature. That is, most people are fascinated (and likely, long to do so themselves) with living an "outrageous" lifestyles

update··on There Is No Handbook for Being a Writer
why did you post this?
update··on There Is No Handbook for Being a Writer
it's pretty funny that the author takes so long to get to their point :P, given the title

Anyone want to post a tldr?

as a paid author, given the title, i was hoping for an article that touched on drinking, lallygagging, and partying --- then getting all your work done in one day at the end of the month.

update··on An Indispensable Guide to Early American Murder
> “The importance of motive in murder is vastly overrated,” he reflects. “What would move one person to kill another might cause a second only to laugh.”

That's food for thought

update··on The life of American workers in 1915
> On January 19, labor leader Joe Hill was arrested on murder charges and executed 21 months later.

I looked into this fellow. One really interesting bit is that he seems to have been executed for a crime he didn't commit, because he refused to give an alibi.

> His most famous songs include "The Preacher and the Slave" (in which he coined the phrase "pie in the sky"[4]), "The Tramp", "There is Power in a Union", "The Rebel Girl", and "Casey Jones—the Union Scab", which express the harsh and combative life of itinerant workers, and call for workers to organize their efforts to improve working conditions.[5]

> In 1914, John G. Morrison, a Salt Lake City area grocer and former policeman, and his son were shot and killed by two men.[6] The same evening, Hill arrived at a doctor's office with a gunshot wound, and briefly mentioned a fight over a woman. Yet Hill refused to explain further, even after he was accused of the grocery store murders on the basis of his injury. Hill was convicted of the murders in a controversial trial. Following an unsuccessful appeal, political debates, and international calls for clemency from high-profile figures and workers' organizations, Hill was executed in November 1915. After his death, he was memorialized by several folk songs. His life and death have inspired books and poetry.

> The identity of the woman and the rival who supposedly caused Hill's injury, though frequently speculated upon, remained mostly conjecture for nearly a century. William M. Adler's 2011 biography of Hill reveals new information about his alibi, which was never introduced at his trial.[7] According to Adler, Hill and his friend and countryman, Otto Appelquist, were rivals for the attention of 20-year-old Hilda Erickson, a member of the family with whom the two men were lodging. In a recently discovered letter, Erickson confirmed her relationship with the two men and the rivalry between them. The letter indicates that when she first discovered Hill was injured, he explained to her that Appelquist had shot him, apparently out of jealousy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Hill

update··on Charles – Web Debugging Proxy Application
Well, since this is up here: Does anyone else get an error in Firefox when using Charles on sites that use HSTS?

I can't use Charles at all in Firefox.

update··on Will humans keep getting taller?
> As an extremely "average" height guy,

Out of curiosity, what do you consider an extremely "average" height?

update··on Microsoft is the first big company to say it's serving the legal marijuana trade
Purposeful. It's a play on the Hollywood, California sign. google "Hollyweed"
update··on Can Netflix Survive in the New World It Created?
> Indispensable employees are a sign of organizational failure. They indicate a weak point in the organization

Contention for fun: "Hands are indispensable, thus, they indicate a weak point in the organization."

update··on All the lonely people
I completely relate and I don't think it's weird at all. I'm currently transitioning to your lifestyle right now.
update··on Facebook Bug Bounties – Unofficial Treasure Map
> Today it wouldn't work because they now have frame-breaking

Yeah. I just want to see what the original vulnerability looked like.

I bug hunt.

Thanks for the offer to email you, but, I'm transitioning away from E-Mail for security reasons.

update··on Facebook Bug Bounties – Unofficial Treasure Map
> 2) For a long time, there was no frame-breaking script on m.facebook.com. You could clickjack essentially anything on Facebook this way. Years ago I did a proof-of-concept on this where I clickjacked a platform app authorization, which let me receive the name, email, and other profile info of any user that did nothing more than click the X button on an annoying overlay I put on the screen.

Do you still have a copy of this? I'd like to see it

update··on FBI wants access to browser history without a warrant in terrorism, spy cases
> The judge in my case was clear about a number of issues. First, the very definition of “espionage” is incredibly broad. Espionage is the act of “providing national defense information to any person not entitled to receive it.” Period. My judge also said that there did not have to be mens rea, or criminal intent, for there to be guilt in an espionage case. And the concept of “harm to the national security” was irrelevant.

--John Kiriakou (He was the first CIA officer to be convicted for passing classified information to a reporter) [1]

Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer.

[1] http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/all_whistleblowers_shoul...

update··on FBI wants access to browser history without a warrant in terrorism, spy cases
> Most people don't know civil forfeiture

Most people don't care about X (civil forfeiture, whistleblowers, Controversial invocations of the Patriot Act, etc.)

> Pay more attention to the election and government processes.

Yes but this completely ignores the fact that most Americans are apathetic to these issues.

What I learned this year was that (as another poster put it) "Gerrymandering, fraud, bribery, voter suppression" were visible, they would also be tolerated.

Also, if you're under investigation by the FBI for espionage, most Americans will STILL vote for you. And the other major half will vote for someone who is clearly racist and (imho) dumb as nails.

update··on GhostShell hacker leaks 39M accounts in security “protest”
> The size of the downloadable cache alone puts it at one of the largest breaches this year -- but it could have been far larger, given time and resources.

> "The worst part is that this is barely a fraction of what I could get my hands on," the hacker said.

So why didn't GhostShell release everything he could get his hands on?

update··on Muhammad Ali has died
I don't know about Frazier, but on Malcolm X, Ali said:

Ali: Turning my back on Malcolm was one of the mistakes that I regret most in my life. I wish I’d been able to tell Malcolm I was sorry, that he was right about so many things. But he was killed before I got the chance. He was a visionary ahead of us all.

…I might never have become a Muslim if it hadn’t been for Malcolm. If I could go back and do it over again, I would never have turned my back on him.

update··on You don't need to code to build a tech product
Opening paragraphs: "When building products you should measure your progress by the assumptions you’ve managed to test, and not by how many lines of code you’ve written.

In some cases — if it’s possible to validate the idea using existing tools — writing code might actually slow you down, and should be avoided."

Worth reading if only for that. I could write an essay on why sitting around & thinking can be far more productive when it comes to coding, rather than -actually- coding.

update··on Peter Thiel to serve as Trump delegate
> This sort revolutionary fervor is generally counterproductive

Do you have evidence for this claim? because to my mind, the exact opposite is true.

I completely agree with OP. I'd prefer Bernie but would take Trump. Some other users were quite rude saying you have to be an idiot to think a rich person would help poor people. I think that's a pretty silly statement, take Bill Gates for instance.

IMHO, members of HN are the vocal minority in their outright hatred for Trump. He will most certainly win the nomination if he goes against Hillary.

update··on Why OpenBSD Is Important to Me
> There's probably not much you can do to defend against an NSA-scale attacker that's targeting you individually.

Hm. How is Phineas Fisher[1] is still on the loose then?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11512845

update··on Why OpenBSD Is Important to Me
> I imagine the NSA has a bag full of OpenBSD exploits [...]. But OpenBSD has gifted to the world a fighting chance--

Doesn't the former sentence negate the latter?

At this point, it seems just about all systems are hackable, given enough resources.

update··on Why Suburbia Sucks
I live in a newer U.S. city and this couldn't be any further from the truth. e.g. Walmart is < 2 miles away.
update··on RouterSploit – Router Exploitation Framework
looks really neat. nothing for my router (Actiontec) unfortunately

also, i had to remove the 'belkin' exploits from the scanner because i kept getting 'connection reset by peer' errors

update··on These states let police take your stuff even if you haven't committed a crime
> Why are so many laws so stupid and unethical,

They were made when the majority of Americans were stupid and unethical.

> and yet still being used?

Because the old generation is still in power.

> How have we let it get to this point?

"the 1960s proved that change is hit or miss, every bloodied pacifist concedes the truth"

In other words, we've tried to fight the system and we lost because they fought[1] back[2].

[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/eriksherman/2016/03/23/nixons-dr...

[2] https://www.rt.com/usa/fbi-assassination-ows-sniper-227/

update··on If You Can’t Break Crypto, Break the Client: Recovery of Plaintext iMessage Data
"Don't bother trying to break encryption, break [whatever] implements the encryption instead"

that's how i interpreted it

update··on FBI Says a Mysterious Hacking Group Has Had Access to US Govt Files for Years
Uncle Sam has the power to obtain all American citizen's data with relative ease, but what's worse is Uncle Sam's servers (which are numerous and disorganized[1]) are hacked even easier. [1]

TLS is cat & mouse game at this point, and we count on closed-sourced systems like Whisper to be the holy grail. It's a sad sate of affairs.

[1] http://www.zone-h.org/archive/special=1?zh=1

update··on Unable to open links in Safari, Mail or Messages on iOS 9.3
> I actually rolled back to 9.2.1

How? I thought Apple didn't allow that. I'd like to go back to 9.1 if possible

update··on My dad hid his depression. I won’t hide mine
Shrinks work for some people. I can't really take them seriously as it always figures to me they're just as much a wreck as I am.

Anyway, if I were you, I'd cut & run.

Like the fellow below said, you're young, don't waste your youth. Send them some money when you can but don't go down with the ship trying.

update··on The Chrome Distortion: how Chrome negatively alters our expectations
I just did a clean install of OS X El Capitan and within an hour it was obvious that Chrome was better at managing memory. [extensions: UBlock Origin, Ghostery]

Personally, I think the browsers actually do beat each other in performance every couple of months. i.e. Chrome Version 49.0.2623.87 (64-bit) is better than (current firefox version) but next month it'll be the reverse.

update··on The Chrome Distortion: how Chrome negatively alters our expectations
I swear this conversation is as old as time --- or at least Firefox & Chrome.

person 1: "Firefox is slow now i'm moving back to Chrome"

person 2: "interesting! I find the complete opposite and am moving back to Firefox!"

:)

update··on Report: Apple building its own servers to prevent snooping
we were never this powerful, though
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